Claire Musser is a filmmaker, environmental photographer, and the Executive Director of the Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project, where she leads innovative education, fieldwork, and advocacy for endangered Mexican gray wolves. Her PhD research in anthrozoology and environmental film investigates what it means for humans and wild carnivores to co-thrive, using collaborative visual storytelling as both method and ethic.

Her short film Bears in Hot Tubs was co-created with Maddie Bear and her kin in Southern California, foregrounding the agency, presence, and self-determined lives of urban black bears. Through patient observation and multisensory filmmaking, Claire’s work invites audiences to recognize animals as sentient, self-directed participants in shared landscapes, rather than subjects of human narratives.

Beyond her film work, Claire collaborates with Project GRIPH and ranching communities in the Western United States on applied, field-based approaches to human–wolf conflict prevention. Her practice combines participatory action research, multispecies ethnography, and ethical storytelling to reimagine relationships among predators, livestock, land, and people.Claire is the author of the forthcoming book chapter Beyond Coexistence: Co-Thriving with Wolves in the Anthropocene (Exeter University Press, 2026), which articulates a co-thriving and future-facing framework for multispecies thriving grounded in care, reciprocity, and shared agency.

claire@anthrozooco.org

Sarah Heaney is a fifth-year, part-time PhD candidate in Anthrozoology at the University of Exeter. Her doctoral project, “Kissing Sharks?” explores the unconventional, and intimate shark-human relationships co-developed by Cristina Zenato and a shiver of Bahamian Caribbean Reef and Nurse sharks.

The project examines the origins, evolution, and impact of shark-listening, aiming to contribute to reshaping societal perceptions of sharks. Sarah is motivated to use her academic investigations to add to the humanist de-centering ‘turns’ pioneered by post-anthropocentric, post-humanist scholars.

For Sarah, anthrozoology is more than an academic pursuit. Her aim is to engage her anthrozoological knowledge, as a scholar-activist, and the EASE ethos in the world, to join the effort in creating a paradigm shift in how morethanhuman-animals are viewed. Her commitment to this goal is reflected in her research on cat abandonment in Saudi Arabia, the co-founding of The Anthrozoology Podcast and the Anthrozoology as International Practice Conference with her AiP colleagues. Sarah is also a co-founder of e-CATT, and collaborates with cross-disciplinary academics whose interests, interlink with (Felis catus) or small wild cats.  Further information about Sarah’s research outreach, publications and collaborations, can be found here.

sarah@anthrozooco.org